OpenGLAM Benchmark Survey

The OpenGLAM Benchmark Survey is an online survey that is conducted among heritage institutions throughout the world during 2014/2015. The main purpose of the survey is to measure the state of advancement of OpenGLAM (digitization, inter-organisational cooperation involving the exchange of metadata, open data, crowdsourcing, linked data) in the participating countries and to identify the main challenges and obstacles with regard to the promotion of OpenGLAM and free access to knowledge.

The survey is carried out in a collaborative effort of national chapters of the Open Knowledge Foundation, by Wikimedia chapters, NGOs, heritage institutions, and research institutions.

So far, the survey has been conducted in Poland and Finland; in other countries, data collection is still ahead or presently ongoing.

Preliminary Results from Poland and Finland

We took the GLAM-Wiki Conference in The Hague as an occasion to present preliminary results from the first two countries (slides). Here some of the key findings...

Regarding the adoption of various Internet-related practices within the heritage sector:

Digitization and the Use of Social Media are widespread practices in the Finnish/Polish GLAM sector, with adoption rates above 50%.

Open Data and Open Content are about to diffuse within the FI/PL GLAM sector.

Collaborative Content Creation is diffusing more slowly than Open Data / Open Content.

Regarding the prerequisites for Open Content:

Over the next 5 years we will see leaps in digitization activities.

Ca. 80% of institutions think that opening up content helps them better fulfill their core mission.

In general, issues related to copyright clearance are not a show-stopper regarding the opening up of content; across all object types, as far as copyright is concerned, institutions would have the right to release at least 50% of their holdings as open content.

When it comes to promoting the opening up of content, the present mindset of GLAMs poses two major challenges: their aversion against the prospect of commercial use of open content, and their reluctance to let third parties modify the content.

Regarding the institutions’ involvement in Wikipedia:

Ca. 30% of Finnish/Polish GLAMs consider Collaborative Content Creation as important and believe that the opportunities prevail over the risks.

Ca. 20% of GLAMs are already involved in Wikipedia.

Wikimedia Commons and Wikidata still seem to play a minor role for GLAMs (with 3% and 2% of institutions involved).

If you would like to have a look at the data and run your own analyses, you are free to do so – the data is available online.

We will use the Wiki-Conferences and this newsletter to spread further results as we are getting data from further countries and start digging deeper into our data. The conferences will also be a good place to engage a dialog with the GLAM-Wiki community in order to foster the sense-making around the data. – Therefore, stay in touch if you’re interested!

How About Your Country?

In case you would like to run the survey in your country as well, this is still possible – don’t hesitate to get in touch!